The Disturbing Truth Behind Death Note (Complete Series Review)

you know most people i know have seen death note but most people i would wager don't actually know what death note really is about so it's a show about pizza despite the original manga only running for about two and a half years in weekly shonen jump the series has since its debut in 2003 sold over 30 million copies on just three volumes alone spawning a wildly popular anime adaptation for live-action films two of which are based on completely original material a j-drama multiple video games multiple stage plays and musicals and even regrettably an american remake film produced by netflix critically it remains one of the most highly acclaimed and off-discussed manga in circulation to this day though interestingly this seems to primarily be maintained in the west while in japan the manga's notoriety has waned enough to where it didn't even show up in the top 100 when tvsi surveyed japanese readers in late 2020 while using the phrase monolithic would generally come off as arrogant it's difficult to describe death note as anything else while most of the series that jump publishes even the titanically popular ones like dragon ball and one piece exist as entities within jump's collective branded canon death note exists almost entirely as an entity unto itself separate from it all heck the mere mention of a notebook that causes death is something which acts as a reference to the franchise with countless parodies and homages that have sprouted from it over the years even actual literal real-life murders have been committed in tribute to this very franchise and while screwed up on so many levels it only further speaks to the iconography the story itself possesses as a piece of literary canon it is however this public discussion that i feel like something has been lost not just in so far as the back and forth on various specificities regarding its story but even the central ideas on the manga itself have been lost i believe pressed under a mountain of adaptation and misinterpretation to where the original meaning has been almost entirely lost for this analysis i think it's worth looking back at the original work and consequently asking a simple question what exactly is death note really about death notes to mangaka writer tsugumi oba and artist takeshi obata are two men with interesting personal histories to say the least while it has never been confirmed by a direct source a popular rumor about tsugumi oba is that he is and always has been nothing but a pseudonym for gag mangaka hiroshi gammo gamo's work was very much a prototypical jump gag series of the time dense in absurdism in wordplay and geared heavily to jump's child audience while this did make him something of a favorite amongst jumps offices demonstrated in a mostly cafe feud he had with competing gag manga arthur yasui kita that saw keita end his own series outright blaming gamu for his inability to get off the ground the well dried up and after two attempted runs in 1998 and then 2000 failed to garner publicity gamu more or less vanished from the public eye entirely obata on the other hand is a bit of a different story achieving the much vaunted tetsuka prize in 1985 and performing his first formal serialization cyborg grandpa ji when he was just 20 years of age mobata had gained a reputation as a budding talent over a series of collaborations in the 90s before hitting it big in 1998 when he together with yumi hota created hikaru no go the series was a runaway success spawning a resurgence in goa as a game and lasted to mid 2003 just a few months before death note debuted the reason i bring these two backstories up is to offer a point of contextualization on the series as a whole death note is not the work of some young author coming in to jump to shake things up with a bowl new vision but a collaboration of a 40 year old washout under a false identity and a superstar artist still writing his fame working together under prior relationships they had within jump itself looking at the timeline of the end of ikaru the one shot's publication and the official serialization of the manga itself it becomes clear that death note has been essentially primed in a pipeline from the start with the one shot itself just meant to gauge audience reception and establish the false identity of oba to the public its artistic deviations from jumps norm are not a visionary working against a hierarchy but instead a hierarchy purposely deviating from itself for revenue and this is all to say that a common statement made about death note insofar as its relationship to jump is that it doesn't fit in with the rest of jumps publications and on a surface level observation looking at what was being published at the time this is correct at a time where jump was primarily embracing bright fanciful narratives full of youthful boyish optimism death note is harshly cynical decidedly grounded in its scope and operates less on dramatic climaxes as much as meticulous buildup and articulation of its cast only about a dozen are given substantial page time or focus of any kind and even then the manga with one exception notably avoids dedicating substantial flashbacks to explaining character backstories and motivations instead choosing to center the story squarely around a singular serialized narrative without any breaks of any kind this was compounded of course by light himself not just in the obvious fact that he is a literal mass murderer but light in many ways was not someone jumps target reader base was set to relate to unlike the scrappy outcast and delinquents who defined protagonists in the publication for the last 15 years light is a top level student set for the best university in the country beloved by his peers popular with women and is the son of a deputy director of the japanese npa he is not someone to be associated with but an archetype of ideal japanese youth and the manga crucially uses that as shorthand for his entire characterization that feeds into every aspect of his personality and actions what especially sticks out about this is when one reads death note's original one shot pilot the pilot while it retains much of the bases insofar as the idea of the death note and shinigami including the character of ryuk it is otherwise radically different and in a way that makes it far closer to a typical jump manga the one shot's protagonist taro kagame is an ordinary 13 year old kid who after accidentally killing his bullies with the death note is utterly horrified by the deaths he's caused to the point of being unable to sleep he refuses to use a death note after understanding his true purpose tries to actively cooperate with the police and goes out of his way to stop his best friend from using the notebook even at risk of his own life everything that light is not what is most striking however is the inclusion of a single plot point that radically goes against everything in the actual series the death eraser using an eraser provided by ryuk taro is able to erase the lines of text written in the notebook and undo the debts it has caused the only caveat being that the body still needs to be intact for this to work there are no downsides to this and the story even demonstrates this directly in the climax where taro demonstrates its power by using the notebook on himself and then having the eraser bring him back the one shot ends with the death note being destroyed and in an interesting foreshadowing of the manga itself taro and ryuk years later observing how the death note has become an urban legend the final page essentially asking the young readers what they would do if they had such an item now considering that the pilot was again most likely made after the serialization was fully planned it's interesting how it seemed to have been purely built not off advertising the actual premise of the manga but instead the idea the idea of a shinigami's notebook that kills whoever's name is written inside this is in a way illustrative of the series as a whole because what the death note was sold on was its idea and the conceits that spawned from it in a jump which was more or less defined by the three central manga running within it death note was the edgy counterculture piece the outsider that broke all the rules and because of that warranted attention as the rule breaker it was in a sense jumps alternative art but the weird thing is it's still kind of fit [Music] death notes anime has some of the most killer music in all of anime and what better way to experience that than with raycon's everyday earbuds that now look sound and feel better than ever they're so light you'd barely even know they were on your ears these bad boys are deathly cool and take note of all these awesome colors i'm rocking the flare reds and they fit perfectly on my ear thanks to the optimized gel tips i can flail around like a madman and they straight up won't budge the fact it's got 8 hours of constant play time and a 32 hour 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stated in multiple interviews that he never intended death note to be seen as being about the moral quandary of the death note itself that the series was intended first and foremost as a work of entertainment and this shows itself in the framing and the structure of the story even though the entire premise revolves around light in his accomplices committing mass murder essentially every day the manga seems to deliberately do everything in its power to downplay that as much as it possibly can outside of a handful of circumstances where it's used on scene bodies are purposely almost never shown in spite of the hundreds they are inferred to have killed any and all references to societal ramifications with light's crimes are kept to a minimum and instead the series is mostly situated around long monologues regarding the meticulous point-by-point nature to which light and elf perform their battle of wits tonally the manga is surprisingly light given the subject with persistent use of comic relief designed to power its narrative nearly every scene light is in ryuk misa or matsuda will say or do something dumb and the gag will be that light as the straight man barely responding to it multiple times the series will do a sudden tonal shift to have stuff like light and l bonding over a very intense game of tennis or have matsuta go through a comedy of errors as he tries not to be killed by the otsuba group misa despite being a mass murderer herself is never treated as anything more than light's perky female sidekick and her flippancy under which she commits her crimes is never really stressed even light's trademark grin used often as a mark of tension is used multiple times as a gag where he wears it where it is inappropriate as if even that part is just for the fun of it and i stress all of this because demystifying death note as this mature philosophy piece which it most definitely is not exposes what its actual core appeal is the back and forth of light and l with ryuk a purely passive observer who serves primarily as a source of exposition and to give light someone to talk to light and l are the only characters of significance with an active role in the narrative each scenario the manga sets up in part one is designed around exploring the angles in which l sets up traps for light to fall into all the while light attempts to get out of them with each minute detail given attention and dissection as a possible opening a really good example of this comes in chapter 16 and 17 when l has light's room bugged in order to monitor him on a base this is a really interesting scenario because elle has put light into a deadlock either he'll be exposed using the death note or he'll be indirectly exposed when the kira killing start declining while he's under surveillance the manga is aware of this and thus the intrigue comes in watching how light combats it first by laying out how he figures out that he's being monitored at all and his counter-attacks of having ryuk locate and remove the cameras then laying out each calculated action he takes to ensure he can continue his murders without being seen and safely disposes of the evidence however the manga crucially does not give light a complete victory as his cover strategy still crucially leads to an aberration in kira's murders that increases l's focus on light this in turn leads l to enroll at lights university completely shifting their dynamic while progressing the story to its next stage this kind of interplay demonstrates what part one is all about it is a hyper-stylized reinvention of the classical homes vs moriarty scenario the mythologized battle between the eccentric genius detective and the criminal mastermind with the added twist of moriarty as the main pov character elle's character consequently is designed as the perfect opposite to light his unkempt appearance unnatural posture and cam demeanor all contrast against what defines light soichiro and misa the most important characters in part 1 besides the main duo accentuate this suichiro as a watson provides an added conflict in how he is both directly aiding l yet also refusing to believe light as the culprit while misa upon her introduction provides light his mara a loyal accomplice who while not an intellectual fighter provides a direct actor who gives moriarty slash light a host of actions not possible as a lone actor and framing all of this is the series final essential element the rules concluding nearly every chapter is a relaying of the various rules with which the death note shinigami and associate elements function under and how they work the notebook kills by writing someone's true name while picturing their face unless specified the cause of death will be a heart attack initiated 6 minutes and 40 seconds after the name is written all that's needed is not the notebook but the paper within and so on these rules go extremely in depth laying out numerous theoreticals and the vast majority don't factor into the story at all but all of them go aways in establishing something important what is and isn't possible for light and other characters to do even if something is seemingly irrelevant the fact that it is a possibility is something which the reader is made to consider light even exploits the importance of this mechanic by hinging a crucial tactic on forging rules essentially invoking the later ellery queen problem to grant himself an airtight alibi and that is death note's appeal in a nutshell the point in which the mind games go so far to where even the in-story mechanics are being exploited as tactics this kind of back and forth built into part one structure takes on a really interesting turn in the latter half while light loses his memory and the story switches to a more traditional jump narrative where he and l team up this is generally speaking viewed as a weaker part of the story as the mind battles take a back seat and the story kind of drags its feet through 20 chapters filled with repetitive scenes of the same generic businessmen talking about the same topics ad nauseam but what makes it work is in how the conflict creates a fascinating new dimension to the core dynamic of light and l through which the two characters together exchange theories and try to deduce just who exactly the new kira is the reader gets a far better idea of both what makes the two so similar and yet so different the weight for the core conflict to resume is something which is actually made a focal aspect of the plot exploiting the reader's curiosity as to when and how that will happen and it's when that moment is reached that gears shift and we have to re-examine the series from an entirely different angle by far the most polarizing critical assessment of death note is a simple one was the latter half of the story even necessary it is hard to argue against the fact that the latter half of the manga which i'll now call part 2 for brevity is decidedly unpopular not only does the 2006 anime substantially power it down to 12 episodes in spite of adapting the only slightly longer part 1 in 25 but both the live-action films and j-dramas substantially alter the narrative so to end the series with part 1 working in plot aspects of part 2 but crucially ending the series so that it concludes with light and l's final fight ask anyone on any anime discussion platform out there and they will say part two was a mistake a failure of design and all kinds of other negative statements that overall color how the story is viewed today there is overall a lot to unpack about what does and does not work and what exactly what is there is supposed to mean so let's dig into that by first addressing the common criticisms at play firstly by far the key central complaint towards part one is an obvious one that the story continues after elle's death not only is el himself the most popular character in the series as one look at my anime list will tell you but the very core appeal i talked about is something which cannot function if either light or l is dead this would naturally suggest the story's combination to be at this point but instead the story goes against this and continues on with a character who while crucially not actually a copy of l still greatly resembles him in demeanor all the while sporting a design which is essentially a palette swap tellingly in regards to this attachment to l is in how both live action adaptations have him ultimately be victorious over light albeit at the cost of his own life this i think stems from a misunderstanding on the narrative purpose of elle's death and also how it works as a thematic undercurrent for the larger story as a whole in killing off l oba not only opens up the narrative into a scenario where light has won but divorces the conflict away from l the person and instead to l the idea nir despite his similarities 2l is pointedly not l in many ways he is far more emotionally calm and displays a philosophical understanding far larger than what his predecessor ever displayed and that emotional disconnection he displays allows the conflict to shift away from a two-man conflict to something more universal in scope i'll get into this more later but for now i just want to say in order for the story oba and obata were telling to work light needed to beat l nothing more nothing less another complaint i see a lot of the series is that the loss of l causes the series to no longer have anyone for the reader to root for light and his accomplices are monsters bello is an immoral terrorist and criminal and near while not terribly different from elm morally is too much of a passive stuck-up kid to really enjoy following by consequence the story becomes draining to follow as there is no one to connect with essentially giving into the nihilism underpinning the story as a whole this too is something i think is wrong while they may not be the primary drivers of the main narrative the japanese task force is given substantially more focus as characters throughout the second part and with this focus comes a crucial amount of emotional grounding that was just absent entirely from part one izawa who in the first half of the series was largely a background character notably takes a major role as one of the main pov characters as we see him slowly accept who light truly is and watching the feelings of these ordinary men reacting to an ever deteriorating situation losing their collective mentor and then slowly realizing what they'd been fighting for was in large a lie is seriously compelling stuff that contextualizes the narrative through to its closing moments and i'm honestly surprised it's not talked about more but indeed these points do frame the difference in part 2 which makes it both so polarizing and at the same time fascinating to discuss while part 1 was centered purely on the deadlock of light and l part 2 takes a far broader approach touching on the global idea of kira and his worship the ideals of fixing society which light's motives are built around and overall constructing a complex interconnected web of ideas which together all build to a singular point where light's world view is succinctly rejected rather than designing the narrative around the singular point of two characters fighting oppa instead switches to the arguably high route of positioning the story about light's eventual thematic and literal defeat and that is if anything a far more interesting story than el defeats light could ever be unfortunately while the ideas in play are not bad the actual handling in story demonstrates a number of fundamental problems in the design that causes the manga to fumble the execution by far the biggest problem part 2 struggles with is in its structure while i wouldn't exactly call the series rushed each major conflict is resolved more or less at the same speed as beforehand and there's rarely a plot point that feels like it should have been delved into more the sheer breakneck speed at which story elements and ideas are introduced discussed and resolved becomes almost dizzying only a few chapters after l dies the story shifts into full gear to have mellow kidnapped light's little sister in the process setting off a plotline in america with a vastly more dramatic scope than anything in the series however this ends almost just as quickly with mellow being written out of the story almost entirely and the manga is forced to pivot into both nears plotting against light and introducing mikami and takada as light's new accomplices however since nir cannot directly go against light until it's time for the climax the only thing the manga can do is wander around through subplots until that point and then it suddenly remembers mello is still alive and hauls itself to kill him and takada off in the span of a single chapter it's a christmas miracle an event which comes incredibly abruptly in spite of being what a major amount of the finale is built upon and this is essentially the core issue underpinning part two because the only logical story direction oba has is to have near defeat light the entire narrative until that point is just delaying the inevitable and consequently the story is left over complicating itself to compensate chapters are routinely interrupted by lengthy monologues designed to recap information and it becomes often difficult to remember who knows what not helped also by how often the series will reveal that what characters thought they knew was just false information while individual subplots such as kira's global warship or izawa becoming near's inside men on the task force are interesting as well as narratively and thematically relevant the way these storylines pivot between one another never really feels cohesive and there's a lot of space where it feels like the story could have used its time better probably the biggest victim of this kind of narrative crunch is near unfortunately while the complaint about him being a carbon copy of l is inaccurate the lack of any real breathing room combined with how passive a character he is means that his role for much of part 2 is largely relegated to just occasional cutaways which seem to exist mainly to remind the reader that he even exists his relationship with light lacks the personal edge that made elle so compelling and his tactical maneuvers are mostly just in recapping things the readers already know while again the point still sees the engagement suffer because of it conversely light's role is dramatically reduced as the shift in focus means he's rarely put in the actual conflict until the end up until the climax light in part 2 is a bit of a cipher as the fact that he's already effectively won means there's nowhere for him to go until he's beat he doesn't really affect near or mellow as much as they vaguely affect him and his relationships with his accomplices despite them being what the climax in part hinges on is crucially underdeveloped to where it's not quite clear what he thought of mikami even by the end and that's the thing while part 2 tries to expand the scope to a thematic ideology it consistently is unable to juggle the way that entails ideas like kira's worldwide influence and worship are left feeling unexplored and underdeveloped characters like mikami feel forced in without proper build up or payoff and there is overall a dragging pace while the shift outside the two-man battle formula is commendable it comes at the cost of the thrilling mind games which part one enjoyed and is overall in layman's terms a bit of a drag which makes it all the more impressive then that despite the myriad of flaws the second half suffers from the climax is genuinely gold even though it is effectively just seven chapters of the remaining characters standing in a dark abandoned warehouse and talking the series finale is easily the tensest most dramatic cohesive section of the entire narrative skillfully managing to weave a proper culmination to every idea that had ran through the story and given greater purpose to the previous 20 odd chapters which all existed to set this up the climax especially serves to demonstrate full purpose to near as his calculated approach allows the finale to carry itself without any unneeded actions or snapbacks and watching him refute light so simply is in a sense delightful [Laughter] while it's not perfect i can't really imagine a better way for death note to end if the overall story was about light's crusade against evil then what the story needed to end on is this not a grand battle with the fate of justice on the line but on a question being answered the true thematic conclusion to the tale which finally brings us to the ending and the meaning of this story without question the biggest and most persistent misconception about death note is what exactly it's about most sources youtube reviewers geek culture news sites and just random people on social media present this about the idea of justice and how the series is reliant on the question on if light's crusade is right light is a mass murderer yet in killing criminals he is arguably doing the right thing by punishing evil as light himself states in being presented with a god which punishes all evil people are made to become kinder and war premeditated murder and organized crime are all but eradicated crucially what these arguments do is press forward a single straightforward claim that the series provides no true answer to the core dilemma if light was truly right to perform his crusade or if ellen near were right to have him stopped what is justice is up for the reader to ultimately decide only problem though there is an answer and it's pretty plainly that light is wrong from the very start of the manga light's murder spree as kira is never shown as anything other than a negative never once in the series are we ever shown positive results from his murders indeed it's explicitly noted that crime goes past the rate it was before kira became a thing after the murders temporarily go away besides misa who is not meant to be seen as sympathetic in the slightest no one is ever shown being benefited from light's crimes and the only one who suggests such matsuda is repeatedly called out for it by other characters moreover the idea that light is anything but a villain is laughable even though light sincerely does believe he is doing the right thing his characterization is shown to be petty unhinged and remorseless insofar as the innocent lives he takes and he displays an extraordinary absence of sympathetic and humanizing traits never once does the manga or creator ever portray him as a fallen hero all it does is refer to him as childish and quote pure this is important and indeed he can't be as everything he does by the end is stuff he was planning to do from the start even when he dies the reader isn't invited to morton but just think about the sort of person he was this is all clinched in the most thematically crucial moment of the entire series when after an extended six page rant expressing all of his motives and world view light's entire ideology is destroyed when near bluntly tells him that as he cannot dictate what is objectively right or wrong kira is therefore nothing more than a murderer seeing as ellen near openly state they are not fighting kira for the reason of justice but respectively personal interest and pride as the world's greatest detectives and regarding near a desire to finish what else started this actually gives a different message entirely that justice does not exist as an objective concept but only what one perceives in their own mind hence forcing that justice onto the world as a god is wrong not because of ethics but due to that very contradiction itself where this gets really interesting though is when one discusses the anime and specifically how it impacts the viewer's interpretation of light i've been kind of avoiding talking about the tetsuro araki directed anime thus far primarily because i think the manga is more valuable as a source text but a lot of the misunderstandings the series has are rooted in iraqi's directorial choices as an adaptation most crucially to this is the way it frames light's character and the story through homages and invocations of judeo-christian art literally using a direct comparison to michelangelo's the creation of adam in the op to depict light receiving the death note from ryuk a presentational idea which doesn't even make sense when you break it down the soundtrack is persistently laced with booming chants associated with christian imagery most often used when light's plans are in play whereas the manga is mostly told in plain light and staging the anime adds a heavy color gradient which stresses the apocalyptic atmosphere rather than simply presenting a shot of him noticing the notebook light's discovery is framed with heavy shadows that show the darkness symbolically pulling him in when light declares his desire to become the god of the new world while the manga shows a shot of his eyes to express his conviction the anime instead frames it against the setting sun this very act displaying a defiance of the heavens themselves light in the anime is at once lucifer and the corrupted first man tempted by the evil apple of enlightenment everything about the adaptation is designed to reinforce this interpretation in spite of how utterly against the manga it is light's inner monologue which demonstrates his willingness to kill anyone even his own little sister is heavily cut down upon while the anime pays way more focus on the grandeur of his killing spree and ideological fight with l notably the anime cuts out the majority of light's motive rent in the climax outlining his entire world view just having him argue that he's made the world better and thus did what no one else could all of this together goes to create a very different character one who was not a twisted distortion of japanese youth but instead some sort of dark messiah who twists the world to his whim now while some of these changes are likely just the adaptation itself at play i mean part two of the anime is heavily trimmed down for the manga and light's persistent thoughts would have worked quite poorly in an active visual medium but what cannot be viewed as anything but an intentional change comes in the anime's ending and this is where things get irritating for the most part the manga and the anime have the same events play out after light's final gambit to kill nir the task force and the spk via mikami is foiled and light has his secret identity exposed light attempts to kill near via the spare notebook piece in his watch is gunned down by matsuda and then slowly bleeds out before ryuk puts him out of his misery with the death note in the manga this is done to make light look as pathetic as humanly possible writhing around in pain as he begs for someone to help him and kill everyone else before culminating in him desperately pleading repeatedly how he doesn't want to die as the futility of his existence becomes apparent ryuk then writes his name in the death note and light's body drops lifeless to the ground the conclusion of light yagami in the manga is a two-page spread of his dazed corpse as unsightly as the countless people he killed in the anime however light somehow manages to run away from the task force after being shot despite the obvious fact that he should effectively be immobile at this point and we are also treated to a slow montage of light's life slowly flashing before his eyes while sad music is playing there is no desperate pleading for his enemies to die or his own survival and instead light's final moments are him quietly passing away on a staircase with just ryuk there to comfort him and say they had a fun time together as the anime erases the manga's epilogue this is essentially the note the series closes on framing it around lights tragic rise and fall from grace an idea which is pretty much as far away from the manga as you could possibly get in other words according to this light tried to do the right thing and he should be mourned for in spite of the horrible crimes he committed along the way this kind of reinterpretation and attempt to justify a misconception about the text as the actual truth continues into all other adaptations of the story essentially piling on top of each other this idea that falls apart the moment you actually read the original text the live-action films while they have to have light's crimes escalate much quicker as a way of moving the plot along it gives his motives and mises backstory far more focused than the actual source material ever did and thus makes him substantially more sympathetic as characters including giving light a far more humanizing death scene than the one he gets in either the manga or the anime the j-drama discards light's most defining character trait his immense intelligence and ego in favor of him being an ordinary university student who does give a about his family and misa and is shown saving people as kira the netflix adaptation however goes the whole nine yards and transforms him into the stereotypical bullied outcast kid who just wants to make the world better and is horrified by the idea of killing innocent people who are in his way with by the way all of the original negative traits lighthead backported into this version of misa which is just another classic netflix girl bossification of a character which in attempting to fix a quote problem with the source material instead turns the character into a rapidly misogynistic stereotype now my point with listing these changes isn't to illustrate all the ways adaptations try to make light more sympathetic but to instead display a consistent pattern in how death notes myriad of adaptations approach the source material light's numerous villainous traits his readiness to murder innocent people who get in his way his complete lack or care for anyone but himself and his utter refusal to see anything he does as morally reprehensible all openly get in the way of what most people imagine death note to be about and thus adaptations seek to rectify this by changing the story to suit this desire it's not as much about changing the story to the adaptation's own vision per se but instead correcting the original narrative to what they think it should be that or they're trying to make the story about lightning's epic bromance which they do quite a lot mind you the really ironic thing here though is that for all of the posturing about biblical imagery and right and wrong the adaptations do none of them actually seem to properly understand what the original manga is about that being essentially a societal critique in the early 1990s japan went through something of a societal collapse after an entire decade of rapid financial growth sudden widespread policy changes in 1989 led to a bubble burst and nationwide recession that would last the next 20 years the group perhaps hit hardest by this was the quote lost generation the japanese youth who after spending their entire lives being extensively pressured to study their asses off get into high quality universities and from there inherit the world from their parents entered the workforce to instead find a world with no jobs a collapsed marketplace and an older generation which seemed only interested in throwing their own problems onto others many many texts have been written about the influence of this generational disillusionment and how it permeated so much of the iron culture developed after that bubble burst but what matters here is a single terrible event in march of 1995 a series of coordinated attacks were carried out across the tokyo subway system wherein packages of siren gas wrapped in newspaper were carefully placed inside the trains during rush hour and then punctured by umbrellas as the culprits fled the scene the attack in total killed 13 people and seriously injured a thousand more with it being only sheer luck the number wasn't higher the event itself ended up sending all of japanese society into a panic in the wake of the incident the organization that had carried out such a large-scale event was identified to have been a controversial religious group based near mount fuji one which had been growing ever since that very bubble burst they were an organization that society would describe as nothing but evil they would make members demonstrate loyalty by killing friends and family they killed anyone who sought to criticize or investigate them and kill their loved ones alongside them they would take part in depraved drug-fueled parties designed to free their souls their charismatic leader was a man who spoke of the coming apocalypse and world war iii stockpiling weapons and developing bioterrorism plots in secret their goal was to overthrow the japanese government and bring about a war only they as the chosen few would survive going so far as to mail a bomb to the governor of tokyo and for the crimes they committed their highest ranking members were all sentenced to death the organization's name was om shinrikyo what made am shinrikyo's crimes so important to japanese society wasn't the severity or horror of what they had done japan had over the last 15 years seen many terrible crimes that struck at the darkness of the human heart the devastating yamaichi yakuza war the prolonged 46-day murder of junko furuta the depraved child killings of the otaku murderer all these crimes were terrible but they were still the practices of those outside organized crimes social outcasts mysterious villains they were all people society didn't have to recognize people they could easily reject om shinrikyo however was different its membership primarily consisted of young people fresh out of high quality universities the kinds which society put its faith in to continue where the prior generation would leave off yet the disillusionment of an entire generation instead made these people decide to become part of a collective of monsters their leader and founder shoko asahara was a man whose doctrine positioned him as the reincarnation of both buddha and christ seeking to take upon himself all of the world's sins and he carried out all of his crimes believing he was bringing about salvation for the world at large no matter the monstrousness of their actions that kind of conviction was certainly something a lost generation could really rally behind and was even willing to enact whatever terrible acts were required of them if it wasn't obvious this is what light is meant to represent as a character not lucifer but a representation of the kind of inherent bitterness and disillusionment which would drive someone who'd be considered the future of society to become a mass murderer as he himself states in the finale light's desire to become a quote god comes not from a position of arrogance or lust for power but from his own belief that someone had to take up the role and make the world right what light wanted was for people to come to live with kira as a new normality a persistent reminder that evil will bring with it a divine punishment and thus everyone who strays from that path of good will be met with righteous fury this is demonstrative in the kinds of people like targets not criminals in a broad sense but people who act in a purposeful calculated manner to harm others and worsen society he would even go as far as to object to mikabi killing ex-convicts who'd atoned for their sins it is not a coincidence then that all of the characters who displayed sympathy with kira's actions misa matsuda takeda and mikami all belong to the same young generation light himself spawned from he is what they and all of youth want to inherit a world where a savior is truly making things better and of course light is wrong as near says in a world where objective good and evil don't exist all his crimes are in the end is the work of a murderer not a savior light's refusal to understand the weight of his own humanity his own purity that leads him to think he can actually become such an individual and that he would make the world better is why he even used the death note to begin with tellingly what causes light's own downfall is in mikami his own desire for people to understand his worldview which only ends up working against him as mikami ends up ruining everything because of his eagerness to aid kira's world and when pushed into a corner light is left with no option but to deny mikami as a person and when light himself is left begging for someone to save him bikini denies him right back his delusion shattered by the truth of who his god really turned out to be making him then realize that light ruined his life and so in a sense light's true death comes not from being outwitted or as hubris but from his own ideology being proven as wrong and that true defeat comes not from l or near it comes from the one person to represent everything matsuda since his introduction at the start of this series matsuda's role has been that of the comic relief rarely does a scene with him in focus past where he's not made the idiot with characters shouting matsuda you idiot becoming a running gag in the story he's treated as a joke humiliated nearly killed a number of times and overall in general disregarded this makes it all the more shocking and important however when it ends up being matsuda who puts down light for good riddlium full of holes as light barks orders at him to kill nir and the task force even as light tries to convince him to stop matsuda does it and has to be physically pulled away by the rest of the task force before he kills light outright why this scene is so important is simple and yet answers everything death note has been about unlike elle and near's teammates who staunchly agree in kieran needing to be stopped matsuda stands squarely in a gray area as the young rookie police detective who got in on family connections he understands that kira is a mass murderer but can't help but sympathize with him as someone trying to make the world a better place while izawa in part 2 represents how an older reader might feel consistently horrified at the lengths light is going to to ensure his perfect world becomes a reality matsuda represents the younger reader who suffers from that same disillusionment as light did and even knowing it is wrong has a part of themselves that wants it to be right in having matsuda reject light so thoroughly however oba communicates effectively what he wants us as readers to think just as om were not a divine society which would survive armageddon but a psychotic terrorist cult light is not a god delivering humanity on the right path but an insane serial killer enforcing his beliefs onto others matsuda doesn't have an unavenged family childhood bullying complex or lights quote manhood but the compulsion for a better world and light's world is one where that isn't the truth because no one understood life because the vague idea of kira is what some were frightened of some sought to exploit some idealize but none truly could see kira is death kira is god kira is salvation kira is all of those things because it is an idea which light yagami embodies and lisa amane kiyomi takada and terumikami worship but that idea is a child's understanding of those things because light is too idealistic to understand that murder in the name of justice is still murder death note might not be a story of two ideals fighting but it is a story of how an idealist's view of justice is wrong light dies not out of hubris but because he ultimately cannot understand that anyone would truly see him as wrong the final reveal of the series given in the very last rule page is that there is no such thing as the afterlife in a world of shinigami enacting death upon all the entire world itself exists in a state of near cosmic nihilism where one's very soul ceases to be the moment they die light knew this from the start of his journey but when faced with the reality he devolved into fear his pitiful begging reinforcing his own hollowness as he dies miserable and terrified light yagami kira has been defeated his world destroyed his personal legacy all but erased he exists as a cautionary tale at best and a cruel joke at first justice doesn't exist life doesn't exist and a better world doesn't exist so the question comes what then the answer comes in the manga's epilogue notably excluded from the anime it depicts a world one year after light's death where in spite of no one outside of near's team and the task force knowing the truth behind light's crimes the absence of kira has seen the world revert back to the way it used to be matsuda still emotionally scared from the climax discusses a theory he has on it and the possibility of near being himself a far more dubious character than once believed as pointed out this isn't coming from a place of logic or truth but because he wanted to believe that light regardless of his crimes was someone he still wanted to understand and believe in with the world having reverted back in the wake of kira's death can anything of what they did be considered right eide however tells him that he has no doubt they were right because it doesn't matter if near was any more righteous than light was all that matters is that they are alive right now there is no justice in this world but life still exists so shouldn't that be enough well far from perfect death notes imperfections in many ways highlights just how powerful a work it really is it is a story which in its conclusion tears apart every ideal it at one point presented expressly proving the futility in trying to understand the conflict as no different than someone who just wanted something they wanted inside themselves to be true we all wish for a savior we all wish for someone who can write the world's ills our desire for that delusion is disgusting perhaps even disturbing and someone who would take that role on is certainly a madman but it is nevertheless human and as life goes on so too does this delusion our prayers for a better world one which we live in to the very end thanks for watching [Music] you

Channel: Totally Not Mark

Views: 958,060

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Id: zPF4n88_plo

Length: 44min 47sec (2687 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 16 2022